Coach Says State Semifinal Loss is Just a Beginning for Greenwave Girls Basketball

Kevin Wickware stood talking somberly with his assistant coaches in a hallway behind the bleachers at Clark High School last Friday night, moments after his team lost 48-43 to Mater Academy East in a 3A state semifinal game. Music was blaring over the speakers as the Fallon players trickled out of the locker room one by one, many of them with tears in their eyes. Across the court, the Mater East players and coaches exchanged hugs with family and fans.

The loss ended Fallon’s 12-game winning streak and its hopes of a state championship, but Wickware chose to see it as a beginning rather than an end.

“This is a big step forward for our program,” he said. “The way that we’ve been going the last couple of years, to really have this kind of success is a big deal for us and I’m looking forward to what we build on after this.”

A year ago, the Greenwave finished third in the Northern 3A and lost 61-40 in the regional semifinals to Fernley. But halfway through this season, the Greenwave found the winning formula and rolled through the regular season and regional tournament with 12 straight wins, with five of those coming over Fernley and Lowry, the two teams that had represented the league in the state tournament both of the past two seasons.

But nothing the Greenwave saw this season prepared them for the speed on the perimeter Mater East brought into Friday’s semifinal game, and the Knights opened up an 8-0 lead less than two and a half minutes into the game. 

Even after Wickware called a timeout to settle his team, the Greenwave’s next three possessions resulted in a traveling violation, three seconds in the key, and then two missed free throws.

“The thing coming down here is you can only see what you see on film, and I think their speed was a little more than we were anticipating,” Wickware said. “I knew we might have this problem, so I knew we were going to have to settle down at some point. I wasn’t worried about the score because we’ve shown how resilient we are in the past, so I knew we were going to close that gap, it was just a matter of how long it was going to take us to kind of calm our nerves a little bit.”

Janessa Bettencourt finally got the Greenwave on the scoreboard with 3:49 left in the first quarter, and although they trailed 13-4 heading to the second quarter, the Greenwave had shaken off those early jitters. Fallon opened the second quarter with a 10-1 run to tie the game at 14-14, then Amillya Bishop gave Fallon its first lead at 17-15 with a 3-pointer with 1:58 left in the second quarter.

Mater East outscored Fallon 7-2 to end the first half and added the first four points of the third quarter to go up 26-19, but again Fallon rallied. A basket by Reagan Johnson pulled the Greenwave within 26-26 with 4:19 left in the third quarter, then another three by Bishop to open the fourth quarter put Fallon up 34-33.

After five straight Mater East points, Vernitta Fillmore hit a pair of 3-pointers, the first pulling Fallon within 38-27 and the second tying the game at 40, then Bettencourt scored on a spin move in the lane with 3:48 left in the game for a 42-40 Fallon lead.

But Mater East closed the game with an 8-1 run, with all their points coming on free throws. With the game tied at 42, Johnson blocked a shot, and Mater East’s Victoria Rubio-White committed a foul, giving Fallon the ball. However, the Greenwave turned the ball over on the inbounds pass, and Amija Macon made two free throws for Mater East and a 44-42 lead. An exchange of free throws left Mater East up 46-43, but the Greenwave lost the ball out of bounds on the next possession, and another free throw by Macon put her team up 47-44. One last free throw added to account for the final score as the Greenwave came up empty in their final two possessions.

“I think it boiled down to we just didn’t make shots,” Wickware said. “We had a lot of opportunities, a lot of good shots, the ball just didn’t fall for us, but we know we’ll learn from it and that’s what our goal was.”

Wickware said he doesn’t want the loss to obscure the progress the Greenwave made this season and all they’ve accomplished. He credited the leadership of seniors Megan Johnson, Brynlee Nichols and Bettencourt

“They set the bar high for us this year and we’re hoping the next years down the road we’re going to live up to what we established this year,” Wickware said. “We just played for one another, we didn’t worry about who was successful, we worried about our total success. So, I thought that was big time for us.”

The team had to adjust early because of injuries to Jada Anastacio, last year’s leading scorer, and Dylan Faught, who were expected to be major contributors this season.

“We had to kind of find ourselves, step up into other areas and it was just a whole building process from the beginning, and that was our approach,” he said. “We were going to build along the way and eventually, hopefully, getting the success that we had getting to the state tournament.”